August 21, 2026

NATHAN COFNAS: How I Became the Scapegoat in the Jason Arday Affair.

I’m an easy scapegoat because I hold views about race that are controversial and easily misunderstood. I argue that differences between ancestral populations aren’t entirely due to environmental forces, and that some group disparities stem from natural differences for which no one is to blame. I made a widely quoted statement: “Under a colorblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications, blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students.” That sentence has been cited repeatedly as evidence that I’m a racist.

Few people are aware that my statement about Harvard admissions was summarizing a finding by Harvard itself. In the course of the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard lawsuit, Harvard disclosed an internal study conducted in 2013, which found that, if admissions were based only on grades and test scores, the undergraduate population would be 0.7% African-American—a significant reduction from current levels. Racial representation at many American institutions is maintained by Harvard-style affirmative action.

I didn’t quote Harvard’s statistic to celebrate it, or because I believe that black people don’t belong at universities. There are many brilliant black scholars. But it’s a difficult fact to face that in a truly colorblind system that didn’t take race into account, there would be a shocking lack of diversity in certain institutions. As I said in the controversial essay that mentions the Harvard statistic, “when it comes to policymaking in a multiracial society, we might need to make sure that everyone feels they have a voice in determining our collective fate.” To this end, I argued for taking measures to ensure meaningful representation of major demographic groups. But we shouldn’t do this under the banner of DEI, which automatically blames differences in outcome on white racism.

Many people have asked me if I regret writing the Arday exposé. This is a tricky question to answer. I set off a series of events that led to a death. If I say I have no regrets, it sounds like I don’t appreciate the horrific nature of the outcome. If I say I do regret it, it sounds like I’m accepting moral responsibility for what happened.

The lesson can’t be that it’s unacceptable to point out wrongdoing that implicates powerful public figures. That’s what I did when I exposed fraud and institutional corruption at Cambridge.

Now, for self-interested reasons, there’s another case of corruption that I object to: the scapegoating of a whistleblower by powerful institutions that refuse to accept responsibility for their own actions.

Cofnas writes that he’s been “flooded with death threats, [and] smeared in countless newspaper articles.” It’s obvious from his piece in the Wall Street Journal that all that ink has placed him under a considerable amount of pressure. In an effort to foster an environment where public discourse is informed, fair and respectful, shouldn’t journalists back off in that sort of situation to reduce the potential amount of “media harm?”

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT DOES SEEM THAT WAY: The Disconnect Between Some Military Families and Their Service Member’s Actual Job Is Stunning.

I have, as you might have noticed, pretty much stayed out of the brouhaha over the USS Abraham Lincoln and the other ships keeping watch and running operations in the Middle East.

Mostly because, in my unfiltered honesty, coupled with my personal experience, I haven’t much patience with the whining coming from the junior sailors on board or, frankly, the families who, to excuse a lot of it, oft times don’t really know any better. All they are hearing is that life sucks in every direction, and they hear it often enough, thanks to the age we live in, that they grow convinced that this is something out of the ordinary and their child or young spouse/father/wife/child/whatever is suffering some extraordinary deprivations and conditions that have never before been experienced in the history of modern seafaring.

None of which is true, but these experts would beg to differ, bolstered by a frenzied flood of press reports all feeding on anything that makes the Trump administration and Pete Hegseth’s War Department look really bad, with as much fervor as great whites on a dead humpback.

It’s an easy, lazy target filled with all the ingredients for a drama soup.

I have to admit, I have seen this dependent/family v duty conflict coming for a long time, and the innerwebs age has only exacerbated the situation.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 11:44 am by Stephen Green

WELL, WHEN YOU PUT IT THAT WAY…:

Posted at 10:57 am by Stephen Green

ONCE AGAIN, REALITY OUTPACES THE BEE:

Posted at 10:26 am by Stephen Green

NOBODY TELL ANN ALTHOUSE: Important thoughts about men wearing shorts to the office. “Let’s acknowledge what this is really about: the overwhelming advantage women have in the workplace over the summer months. Sure, women have endured countless millennia of violence and misogyny and discrimination — but sundresses are a godsend for the summer and men do not really have an comparable article of clothing. The fairer sex clearly has a sartorial advantage and this cannot stand is all I’m saying here.”

The A/C was partially out in my law school earlier this week, but luckily the floor with my office and classrooms wasn’t on the dead circuit. I threw shorts and a t-shirt in my car just in case. I’ve taught in those a couple of times in the past. Improvise, adapt, and overcome!

But I don’t think most people want to look at most men’s calves.

Posted at 9:56 am by Glenn Reynolds

NICE WORK: Florida State U. removes ‘correct language’ threat after College Fix inquiry.

FIRE’s Director of Policy Reform, Laura Beltz, told The Fix “academic freedom affords faculty members a great degree of deference in how they govern their classroom” even if this includes “actions that typically run counter to free speech principles in other contexts.”

For example, Beltz described how a student “levying ad hominem attacks at other students during class and preventing the class from reaching the educational objectives of [a] discussion” could reasonably be disciplined by the instructor.

Beltz’s main free speech concern over the Civil Interaction section of the original syllabus is its potential to be unevenly applied based on viewpoint.

“Faculty certainly can’t discriminate against students, so to the extent a rule like this is applied to restrict some viewpoints but not others — not to shape class discussion and meet educational goals but instead to only shut down or grade speech based on viewpoint — that would be problematic,” she said.

Indeed. And after everything we’ve seen the last couple of decades, it’s the safe assumption that viewpoint discrimination is the likely goal.

Posted at 9:40 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Revisiting AOC ’28 After DSA Commie Uprising. “The ‘insatiable media interest’ is AOC’s gargantuan strength if she decides to take the big leap. While the flying monkeys in the mainstream media are incurious about any Dem’s faux pas, they’re positively charmed by everything that Squeaky gets monumentally wrong.”

Posted at 9:09 am by Stephen Green

NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT? ‘Show How 3M Is 0% at Fault:’ Expert Witness Used ChatGPT to Write Report Defending Company in Deadly Explosion Lawsuit. “The incident shows that artificial intelligence has made its way into courtrooms not just in AI-generated legal briefings, hallucinated cases, and adversarial ‘prompt injections,’ but in expert witness testimonies. Court transcripts, deposition documents, and discovery records shared with 404 Media show extensive AI use in an extremely high profile case, where multiple people died and hundreds of millions of dollars in total liability are at stake in ongoing litigation about the explosion. The case also shows that the specific prompts used to create this type of expert testimony can be discoverable during a case, and that those prompts can be quite embarrassing.”

He reportedly was paid $90,000 for his “efforts.”

Posted at 8:38 am by Stephen Green

REMINDER: LEFTIES DECAMPED TWITTER FOR BLUESKY BECAUSE THE CLIMATE ON TWITTER WAS TOO TOXIC.

Disturbing but enlightening stuff.

Posted at 8:22 am by Stephen Green

TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE:

As James Lileks once wrote, “Here’s what I find interesting: whenever the sci-fi movies of the 60s and 70s wanted to set something in a horrible totalitarian world, they just shot on location at a government housing project.”

Posted at 7:44 am by Ed Driscoll

THE NEW SPACE RACE: The floodgates are open after another Chinese company lands a reusable rocket.

The Zhuque-3, or ZQ-3, rocket lifted off from a commercial launch zone at China’s Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 7:35 pm EDT (23:35 UTC) Tuesday, about an hour after sunrise Wednesday at the spaceport in the Gobi Desert. Nine methane-fueled engines powered the 216-foot-tall (66-meter) rocket on a course southeast from Jiuquan, then the rocket’s upper stage took over the task of placing a single satellite into orbit.

The rocket’s first stage, made of stainless steel, soared to the edge of space, then maneuvered toward a prepared landing zone some 240 miles (390 kilometers) downrange, settling to a propulsive touchdown on four extendable landing legs. LandSpace, founded in 2015, declared the mission a total success.

“This mission marks China’s first-ever successful recovery attempt of the first stage of an orbital-class launch vehicle using landing legs, and China’s first successful booster recovery on land,” LandSpace said in a statement. “It is a pivotal flight test for Zhuque-3 as it transitions from the technological demonstration and verification phase toward the engineering application phase of reusability.”

That it took the Chinese — the world’s masters of high-speed copy & paste — a decade just to make their first two catches is a testament to just how difficult this is.

Posted at 7:36 am by Stephen Green